A friend and I were talking about the fact that every time we plug the iPod and/or iPhone into the car, it inevitably plays the first song in alphabetical order. In his case, the first song alphabetically than his is called “Asshole”, which is really embarrassing when the boss rides along.

My first song isn’t obscene, but when you hear it every morning first thing when you plug in the phone, it gets kind of old.

So I decided I’d fix this. So using my trusty copy of Audacity, I created a song that is five and a half minutes of silence, which is enough time for my car and my phone to agree to cooperate with each other, at which point I can change to another song. I named it “a a”, so it shows up first on the list of songs.

And since I’m brimming with generosity, I decided to share it with you folks, in case you have the same complaint. Right-click, save, and add to iTunes

(Note: I talk about Homeland below, and while I try to avoid spoilers — like in the second season finale when you find out that Saul is actually Sgt. Brody’s father — something might slip out.)

So Homeland seems to be cleaning up in the Golden Globes tonight. Coming on top of it cleaning up at the Emmy’s. The lovely Mrs. J and I got caught up with that show over December. Here’s my take:

I remember the first season of Mad Men, when we were watching the Emmys all ready for St. Louis’s own Jon Hamm to bring home the hardware, only to get upset by the dad from Malcolm in the Middle. “Breaking bad?” we asked. “What the hell kind of show is that?”

The answer is: an amazing show. It’s so totally different from Mad Men they’re kind of hard to compare, but after watching, I had no problem with Bryan Cranston winning.

Then last year, after really the most amazing season of TV I’d seen, I was all ready for Walter White to bring it all home, only to get upset by this Homeland show. “Wait, isn’t that what’s her name from My So Called Life? What’s going on here.”

But given our experience with Breaking Bad, we thought we’d check it out.

So I thought the first season was good. Amazingly good. Really some high-quality viewing. Not sure it’s quite at the level of Breaking Bad or Mad Men, for that matter, but I’m certainly not outraged.

That worked out so well, we checked out the second season and managed to get caught up by the season finale, with the shocker when you find out that Homeland is actually a sled. That season was really better than about 98% of all TV anywhere, but there’s an appreciable drop-off in quality. And in discussing this with the lovely Mrs, I think I learned something about TV and why all shows have a limited shelf life.

The writers of the show have an imperative to keep things interesting and throw unexpected things at the audience. The problem is, every time you have some kind of clever plot twist, you introduce a bit of implausibility into the show. Since the reason the audience isn’t expecting it is because it’s something that is out of character on someone’s part. It’s something that violates, maybe subtly, maybe overtly, the overall logic of the show.

Maybe it’s just a straight-up plot hole, like, “Wait, I thought that guy was paralyzed until last season, and now he knows Brazilian Jiu Jitsu? When did that happen?” But usually it’s just something a bit off, where the audience thinks, “Wait, she wouldn’t do that.”

You start piling all those inconsistencies together and eventually people tune out. I think every show does that. But with the action/suspense drama, of which Homeland is certainly an excellent example, the audience is the most interested in being surprised. You need something to show for the preview, after the announcer says “On the next episode of the Emmy-winning Showtime series, Homeland…”

And that’s why those shows tend to lose their flavor pretty quickly. The first season, as I mentioned, was amazing. But that’s because the writers seem to have thought the whole thing through from beginning to end, the pacing, the plot, the characters. The second season was also very well thought out, especially that crazy scene when you find out that Brody is actually a woman (who saw that coming?). But it just didn’t come together as smoothly.

I can’t help but think that the third season will not be as good as the second season, but maybe I’ll be wrong.

As a side-note, this is one of the reasons that Mad Men seems to be holding up pretty well. It’s incredibly slow-moving. Don’t get me wrong, I love to watch it, but sometimes they go three or four episodes with almost nothing happening. There might be two plot twists a season, whereas Homeland has two plot twists an episode.

The lovely Mrs. and I decided to celebrate St. Nicholas Day this year, with some goodies in the boys’ shoes, per tradition. However, neither of us knew which day it was. So I looked it up on Wikipedia. The accompanying picture was a 13th century Russian icon.

Two things struck me immediately about this depiction. Unlike Santa Claus, he is neither A) fat nor B) jolly. In fact, he looks like he may have gone months without cracking a smile. I doubt his laugh sounded much like “Ho, ho, ho”.

Imagine having this guy for a father in law…

On the other hand, if the stories about him are to be believed (and the iconographer certainly would have believed them), he was a very holy man. Take this story, from which we get the tradition of Santa the gift-giver.

There was a certain formerly rich inhabitant of Patara, whom St Nicholas saved from great sin. The man had three grown daughters, and in desparation he planned to sell their bodies so they would have money for food. The saint, learning of the man’s poverty and of his wicked intention, secretly visited him one night and threw a sack of gold through the window. With the money the man arranged an honorable marriage for his daughter. St Nicholas also provided gold for the other daughters, thereby saving the family from falling into spiritual destruction. In bestowing charity, St Nicholas always strove to do this secretly and to conceal his good deeds.

This shows a problem I have with our conception of holiness in the West today. We seem to have one idea of what it means to be Good Person, and it entails being kind and gentle and serene and happy. The Mother Teresa type.

Clearly the person who did this icon had a broader view of holiness. The person depicted here looks both holy and like the sort of man you don’t want to mess with. He might turn the cheek on his own behalf, but he doesn’t look like he would sit by while someone in his flock got his cheeks assaulted.

Frankly, he looks like a thoroughly unpleasant person to be around. Although if we’re going to fight against evil, don’t we need unpleasant people? Don’t we need some people to be stubborn and uncompromising?

It’s a shame our view of being good is so limited. I think we all have the potential to be good and do great acts of goodness. But for some people, being good comes quite a bit easier than being nice or being pleasant. And certainly easier than being serene or being happy. How many people don’t stretch the limits of their inner saintliness just because they don’t see themselves as being saintly?

There’s a reason bishops like the original St. Nicholas are traditionally symbolized as shepherds. And shepherds in the Bible were not Little Bo Peep types. They lived a very hard existence, out in the elements, surrounded by dangers, with no protection for ones own self and your livelihood depending on your ability to protect your flock. They were, in all probability, complete badasses.

Mother Teresa was many things, but she wasn’t a badass. I suspect she would have made a very bad shepherd. And it’s possible that our more enlightened and civilized age doesn’t need badasses any more. Although I think 20 minutes watching cable television will tell you that we’re not exactly enlightened any more (if we ever really were) and 20 minutes watching the Detroit local news will have you questioning how long civilization is going to hold out.

In marketing terms, I think being good just has a bad brand image these days. It certainly isn’t cool, and other than being happy, is there anything in this world more important than being cool?

On second thought, don’t answer that.

P.S. I think “The Holy Badasses” would make a pretty good name for a Christian punk band, should anyone out there feel compelled to start one.

Two things I’ve been doing a lot lately: listening to Steely Dan and thinking about getting old.

I got the “save the date” for my 20 year high school reunion. I seem to recall at my ten year reunion, we were right across the hall from another class having their 20 year reunion. They all looked so ancient to me. Now I am one of those guys, or a year away from it.

We live in a youth-obsessed culture and everyone aged 25 and up seems to be in complete denial about the fact that they aren’t 24 any more. So when milestones happen, I actually appreciate the reminder that the march of time continues on and there’s nothing I can do about it. Although generally speaking, I’ve enjoyed life more as I get older and I no longer mind so much.

There’s a time in your life when you hear some music and you just aren’t ready for it. Maybe you can appreciate it on some level but it doesn’t really talk to you. And then you hear it again after a hiatus and you really figure out what they’re up to.

Steely Dan worked that way for me. I always like them, but didn’t quite see what the big deal was. But now, in my late 30′s, in the cusp of middle age, it’s like I’m hearing them for the first time.

Like the song “Hey, Nineteen”. Take a listen!

This verse in particular caught my attention:

Hey Nineteen
That’s ‘Retha Franklin*
She don’t remember
The Queen of Soul
It’s hard times befallen
The sole survivors
She thinks I’m crazy
But I’m just growing old

Note that this song came out in 1980, a few years before that “Freeway of Love” song came out. And unless you listened to the R&B stations, the only thing you might be aware of Aretha Franklin doing in the whole decade of the 70′s was the song “Think” in that once scene in The Blues Brothers.

To modernize the reference, someone nineteen today was one year old when Kurt Cobain died, and thus don’t remember the King of Grunge.

The thing is, while I don’t mind getting old, I’m not sure I really want to become irrelevant.

If you learn a foreign language, you figure out at some point that learning words and grammar only gets you so far, that you also need to know about the sorts of things people might be talking about in that language. If you are actually going to have a conversation with a Thai person, for instance, you need to know Thai, but you should also know who the King is, the geography of Thailand, their very confusing political situation, Thai kickboxing, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt to know something about Buddhism.

Being a somewhat-typical Gen X type, I tend to look at things through a prism of pop culture, so pop cultural references end up seeping into everything I talk about. But pop culture, almost by definition, doesn’t have a very long shelf-life.

At some point in the future, nobody under 30 will have seen the movie Pulp Fiction or a single episode of The Simpsons. There will be this vast, ever-expanding group of people who have almost no idea what I’m talking about most of the time.

Since hardly anyone knows what I’m talking about already, I suppose I’m pretty well-prepared for this to happen. But still! I would rather people be bemused by my usual inept conversation skills, not because they have never seen the TV show “Remote Control” featuring Colin Quinn and a very young Adam Sandler.

And that’s just my end of the conversation. As I mentioned, pop culture doesn’t last and gets replaced with something else. It’s hard work to keep up. And there’s something kind of unseemly about even trying to keep up. Listening to Steely Dan in one’s late 30′s is one thing. Listening to dubstep in one’s late 30′s is another thing.

Seriously, late-30′s-dubstep-listening-guy, knock that crap off. You know who you are.

Actually, it’s probably happening to everyone. Our culture has been atomizing. Everyone is into some sub-sub-sub-genre (Old School Finnish Death Metal, maybe) and spends all their time on the Internet talking to the same four other people who are also into that sub-sub-sub-genre.

It can’t help but make it harder to find a common ground to talk to actual people in real life. People like your next-door neighbors, for instance. At least I can find something to talk about with other people born in the 70′s. I have no idea what people born in the 90′s talk to each other about.

One final note on “Hey, Nineteen”. The last verse talks about “The Cuervo Gold, the fine Columbian”. I assume Columbian is short for “Columbian Marching Powder” and not “Columbian coffee”. I’m not sure you could play these sorts of things on the radio. More evidence that the 80′s were a much less Puritanical time than what we’re living in now.

Not that anyone asked, but I skipped voting for president. I’d call myself a small-l libertarian, small-government type. Actually, if I had to pick my ideal way of organizing things, I’d describe myself as an anarcho-feudalist. Suffice it to say, my ideology wasn’t on the ballot. We had the big-government guy promising free cheese for everyone. And we had the ostensible limited government guy who would, when it came to it, not actually get around to limiting government.

Because nobody ever gets around to limiting government. Government has been growing relentlessly since the Coolidge administration. No president — not Reagan, not the latest George Bush — has ever left government smaller and less intrusive than when he took over. Like the lady said, the ratchet only turns one way.

In physics terms, elections are just deciding the second-derivative. Nobody is really going to change the first derivative, i.e. the actual direction of the country. We’re just trying to sort out how fast we’re going to get there. One party will get there as quickly as possible and the other party will get there somewhat less quickly.

Although it would be easy to miss this point if all you went by was campaign rhetoric, where one side proclaims “We’re going to change the first derivative” and the other side says, in more hysterical terms, “We have to stop them from changing the first derivative!”

I suspect this was really the last hurrah for the Republicans. Demographics and culture aren’t on their side; they’ll have less a showing next time and even less the time after that. If I had to put money on it, within my lifetime the Republican party, or what’s left of it by that point, will be declared a Hate Group and outlawed. Just a guess.

Of course, uncontested Democratic rule has worked wonders in Detroit. But I’m sure it’ll work better if it’s a nationwide thing. Just look at Mexico under the PRI!

But who really knows? American culture is incredibly shallow and frivolous, but nobody my age or any younger has had to face any adversity at all. Hell, we haven’t even had to worry about inflation. We’re like the Eloi in The Time Machine. I just wonder what would happen if the Morlocks start showing up and eating people.

But never mind about that. Congratulations to all the people pulling for Obama! The second-derivative is yours to command! Enjoy your victory and look forward to many victories in the future.

One night when we were doing bedtime stories, Charlie asked if I would tell him a robot bedtime story. I said I didn’t know any robot bedtime stories. He asked if I could tell him about the three little pigs and the big bad robot wolf.

Well, inspired by that, Gus decided he had his own bedtime story.

GUS: The third Gussie built a house out of ice cubes*. And it was very strong.

Then the Big Bad Wolf showed up and he was hungry and he said ‘Little Gussie, little Gussie let me in!’ And Gussie said, ‘Not by the hair of my chinnie-chin-chin’.

And the Big Bad Wolf said ‘I’m gonna huff and puff and blow your house down.’

(Gus makes a bunch of blowing noises.)

GUS: And the Big Bad Wolf couldn’t blow down the house made out of ice cubes. It was too strong.

(Long pause, while Gus seemed to be thinking of what comes next.)

DAD: Then what happened?

GUS: Then the wolf started to cry.

CHARLIE: And then Charlie opened the door and let the wolf come in. And he gave the wolf snacks. And they played games on the computer.

GUS: And he was a good Big Bad Wolf. The end.

* This is where the story started out. The fate of the first two Gussies is kind of a mystery here. And Gus does call himself “Gussie”. Or “Gussie Michael” if he’s introducing himself.

Sherry “won the Internet” the other day when her decorating masterpiece, Sam’s nursery from the old gray house, was featured on Apartment Therapy, a blog apparently read by a bazillion people (none of whom is me).

It’s very nice for her to be recognized for something like this, especially since having good taste is a worse-than-useless attribute.

We had just been discussing that while watching one of these “let’s redecorate these people’s house so we can sell it” shows on HGTV or Style or whatever network it was. (Technically Sherry was watching it and I was glancing up every now and again from whatever I was reading.)

Anyway, these guys (the identical twins, whoever they are) were trying to help this couple stage their house and the woman had just appalling taste. Everything was way, way too big and way too gaudy and there was just so much of it crammed into every room. Sherry was getting claustrophobic just watching.

But this is the thing: the only people who might be bothered by this are people with good taste. The show’s protagonist not only wasn’t bothered, she was offended when the home stagers wanted to remove all of it and bring in some different furniture.

How much easier it would be if, instead of worrying about color and design and craftsmanship and what “works” with all the rest of the things in the room, if you only had to look for something really big and really extravagant and really expensive? Especially if you were also completely oblivious to the nauseated expression on the faces of people dropping by the house.

So as the holiday season approaches, spare a thought to the people with good taste. They can’t all be featured Apartment Therapy.

I am, as you’ve probably noticed, highly narcissistic. This is really one of my less attractive traits, and I should probably do something about it. On the other hand, if there’s such a thing as a personal “brand”, my narcissism is a big part of it. So I suppose I’m stuck with it; it’s what my adoring fans expect*.

I take some comfort in the fact that I’m a legitimately amazing person and when you think about it, I’m completely justified being as impressed with myself as I am. In fact, wouldn’t it really be a character flaw if I weren’t this impressed?

The problem for me is that I pretty easily spot when someone else’s level of narcissism is entirely unjustified given the person’s overall level of awesomeness. And by “someone” I mean “most people I meet these days and pretty much everyone on the Internet†“. I mean, there’s a healthy level of self-respect, and then there’s the self-worship most people seem to be completely uninhibited in expressing.

Really, this should be considered the most shockingly hypocritical thing anyone has accused anyone else of, except that A) I think it’s really unattractive in myself and 2) like I said, I legitimately am this awesome. I honestly don’t think most people really know this about themselves or know when they’re being especially egregious.

I don’t think human nature changes very quickly and the urge to lay around basking in the glory of oneself is present in all people everywhere. I think the difference today is the Internet.

Thirty years ago, unless you were a journalist, if you had some inane thought and wanted to tell someone about it and how special you were, you’d have to do something like make a phone call. And the one person on the other end would then inform you how inane your thought was and please stop calling me because “call waiting” has not yet been invented and I’m expecting a call from someone with something interesting to say. Who will otherwise get a busy signal‡.

Nowadays, everyone is a few touches away from spraying the world with their opinions. Blogs, social networks, forums, comment threads. It was bad enough when you had to get home to the computer. Now it’s all in your pocket.

I just don’t think people are built for that kind of instant access to a podium. It suppose everyone has their online and offline personal, but the process of spouting off online creates a kind of feedback look of self-importance that can’t help but seep into the offline world. And next thing you know, all your coworkers are complete egomaniacs who can’t stop talking about themselves and their amazingness.

I should really cut this short. I’m afraid the hypocrisy is going to collapse on itself, creating a hypocritical black hole, threatening life itself.

I guess if I have a point for once, it’s that I really don’t think civilization is going to survive the Internet. We had a good run, though…

* See what I just did there?

† Readers of this here blog excluded, of course. You people are terrific.

‡ Remember the busy signal? I’m pretty sure my kids have never heard it and probably never will.